Robotic restaurants, vertical farming, drone delivery, and the future of healthy eating
Fast forward five years to view the future of an industry through the eyes of its most innovative entrepreneurs and CEOs with the 5 Year Frontier Podcast
We had quite a few public launches recently at focal with us announcing
Our curated and facilitated network of 100+ GTM executives at Seed through Series D startups with The GTM Circle
Us open sourcing our internal early stage VC database on findfunding.vc tto help founders find the right investors
Today, I’m excited to highlight the last public launch coming from us for this year:
Meet the 5 Year Frontier Podcast
Fast forward five years to view the future of an industry through the eyes of its most innovative entrepreneurs and CEOs
Delivered as short (~30 mins), insight-packed discussions, my business partner Daniel sits down with founders and CEOs of companies that are reshaping their industries to leave listeners with a preview of what lies ahead.
🔮 Learn what key industries could look like in 5 years.
👩🏻🚀 Witness the evolution through the eyes of leading CEOs.
🤖 Discover who gets disrupted and who wins big.
👽 Hear of mind blowing technology set to reinvent all the rules.
🧬 Reshape your mental model to thrive in the change ahead.
Episode #1: Robotic restaurants, vertical farming, drone delivery, and the future of healthy eating w/ Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman.
Your next salad could be grown in a building 3 stories in the sky, prepared by a robot, and delivered via drone. Sound like classic Sci-Fi? It’s not - Sweetgreen (NYSE: SG) has already put this into production and is starting to roll it out across their 200+ locations. Daniel sits down with their CEO to discuss the future of food in our debut 5 Year Frontier Episode.
What you’ll hear about in the podcast
🧬 Fast food as healthcare
🦾 The Infinite Kitchen, a first in robotic food production based on MIT technology
🌱 Vertical farming for supply chain resilience
🚦Sweetgreen OS and the gamification of work
🛰️ Partnering with Zipline to pioneer drone delivery
♾️ And plenty more!
“Eventually all of our new restaurants, and much within the industry, will be automated.”
The guest:
Jonathan Neman is co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen (NYSE: SG), a delicious and much loved chain of salad restaurants. He and his buddies started Sweetgreen in college and have grown it to over 200 locations, generating half a billion in annual revenue and taking it public on the NYSE in 2021. Sweetgreen has built a reputation of being ahead of the technology adoption curve, developing much of it in house and before the rest of the industry, all while staying authentic to its mission of scaling healthy eating and earning a loyal customer following.
“1 in 3 Americans eat fast food every single day…the negative cost is $2 trillion — $1T on our economy and $1T on our health.”
Daniel’s takeaway from the episode:
Sweetgreen looks at cost structures as opportunities to automate and is a signal where the fast food industry is headed. Labor can be automated with robotic food preparation allowing for quality control and customer engagement to be handled by humans. Human workers are then supplemented by gamified work processes governed by a continuously optimizing restaurant Operating System.
The result is faster through put and greater opportunity to personalize to a customers tastes or health profile. Ghost kitchens run in parallel to serve remote customers with hatches in the wall for quick drone dispatch and just in time delivery. Suddenly a physical restaurant takes on a far more dynamic and multi-output staging facility.
We knew this was coming for retail stores in the next five years but to see it in the more challenging setting of food showcases just how pervasive advanced automation will become in our near future.
Other episodes on their way
Also coming your way is the earth’s largest drone network, fighting COVID with light beams, diseases hiding in our voice, predictive customer service, 100x team performance, sustainable cities, and plenty more!
Enjoy the listen (I certainly did).